Here's one to pick up

frogkopf

A 5 1/2+ hr comp of late 50s work of Donald Byrd (back when he played real Jazz).

It's a shuffle play version of the following 7 albums:

(1) Complete Recordings: Donald Byrd Sextet with Yusef Lateef & Barry Harris
(2) Byrd in the Hand
(3) Off to the Races
(4) In a Soulful Mood (with Pepper Adams)
(5-6) At the Half Note Caf

kargatron

A great deal for sure for lots of good music, but a bootleg, obviously. How much of the material is in or out of print?

frogkopf

It's one of those British releases, so perfectly legal in that country as the copyright lapses after 50 years. Whether it should be sold in the US is another matter.

kargatron

I have no ethical qualms about this or that country's particular copyright laws. I'm more concerned, regarding older music, about the lack of protection (afaik) of remasterings, packaging, etc. I dislike the idea of someone doing lots of work and expense to remaster and package old material, then having someone else ripoff the package wholesale because the music's copyright has lapsed (somewhere). (A notable example is the pricey Charley Patton box and the cheap JSP reissue of same.)

Regarding the music itself, I'd prefer that copyright extend to the creator's life (or N years including their children), be short-term leasable but not sellable (it makes no sense to me that someone could own another's creative IP), and that masterings be protected under a separate copyright protection. In the meantime, I'm wary about these sketchy label offerings - they too often leach off someone else's hard work (the repackagers, not the original maybe long-gone musician).

No question that this set is very tempting.

amclark2

and that masterings be protected under a separate copyright protection.

re-mastering and re-packaging is subject to separate copyright, and given that these are usually taken from 78's, the various pops and scratches should make it easy to tell if two recordings are from the same master, and therefore relatively easy to enforce. I think that often the cheaper ccomps just throw a bunch of 78's on and do a more or less straight rip - which is fine by me; I like the snap crackle and pop. JSP I would think is a separate rip - not a rip off of the other set, because JSP has somewhat of a reliable reputation as far as these out of copyright things. JSP always gets high marks from allmusic and Penguin Guide, and those both usually avoid black label stuff.

This Lennie Tristano set is on the same label as the Donald Byrd.

kargatron

Mastering is subject to copyright? I've never heard of any upheld copyright violations on the basis of mastering/mixing alone, nor have I heard of any kind of criteria that would identify such a violation. Send me any pointers if you have any, I'm very curious. And by "packaging", I meant the activity of compiling (not the design/imagery): doing the research, collecting the recordings to clean up, etc. That's part of the issue with the JSP set - as I read about it at the time, the Revenant Patton box took an incredible amount of work, and the JSP set appeared some time after the Revenant box came out. I recall reading that some regarded it as wholesale theft and repackaging of the box contents (of Patton's), but I can't find details online browsing quickly this morning.

Yes, JSP has historically been well-respected - this was considered a notable exception at the time, as I read it.

amclark2

I think that the work done to master or remaster a particular piece is part of the copyright for sound recording, which is protected individually from the song itself, which is in turn why labels own the recording while the artist owns the song, which is why artists like Gang of Four come out with re-recording albums - they're not getting any money from the recording, but they still own the songs. There is some creativity involved in re-mastering and cleaning up, and even arguably choosing a sequence, so I think this is protected.

with the JSP and Revenant thing, there is a noticeable difference in the sound between the two, just from briefly checking the samples:

Revenant: JSP

and then the Master Classics version sounds different to me than both of those.

And then there's Document, and Yazoo (which spells it Charlie), and on and on...

kargatron

> the work done to master or remaster a particular piece is part of the copyright for sound recording

I'm skeptical of this, and public domain stuff illustrates why: when a recording is in the public domain, I've never heard of anyone owning separate copyrights to different masterings of that same recording. Regarding JSP, maybe that was all red herring - I never did any comparisons, was just relating what I'd read at the time.

kargatron

Well, I hypocritically caved, just too convenient and cheap, despite much is in print and on Blue Note, even. Clarifying the original releases:

Byrd Jazz (1955)
Off To the Races (1958)
Byrd In Hand (1959)
Fuego (1959)
At the Half Note Cafe (1960)
Motor City Scene (1960)

See the discography for details, easiest to sort by title and multiple-select to modify the tags.

jonahpwll

Byrd Jazz (1955)
Off To the Races (1958)
Byrd In Hand (1959)
Fuego (1959)
At the Half Note Cafe (1960)
Motor City Scene (1960)

All decent albums. I own them all except the first (Byrd Jazz). I think the middle four on the list are all Bluenote (which I got all of them cheap on the old BMG) and the last, I can't remember the label, but it's with Art Pepper, I think, yeah? Maybe Charley label.

I stay away from (non-live) bootleg albums, no matter how good the deal. Inevitably, I wind up hearing a decent studio mix on the legit release and it'll ruin the bootleg for me forever. It's just not worth having a cd on my shelf I won't listen to, especially if it gets replaced by the original release in the end.

Some excellent Donald Byrd to buy are...

Blackjack (excellent on-fire straight ahead hard bop)
Slow Drag (hard bop with the start of some funk leanings that would enter Byrd's sound later in his career)
Freeform (softer bop with some gospel and soul influence)
Another Perspective (experimental hard bop)

All on Bluenote.

kargatron

> Inevitably, I wind up hearing a decent studio mix on the legit release

The sound here is totally decent/"legit" - trivial when you're digitally transferring legit digital copies...

The last was released on Bethlehem, one of the Pepper Adams groups (see the disco).

jonahpwll

The sound here is totally decent/"legit" - trivial when you're digitally transferring legit digital copies...

The last was released on Bethlehem, one of the Pepper Adams groups (see the disco).

I couldn't find much on the Master Classic Records label. What's the deal with these tracks exactly? They're the original recordings remastered by someone other than BlueNote? That seems wrong that Bluenote, struggling to stay afloat, is reissuing some of these albums as RVG editions and another company can just piggyback that work. However, that seems incidental to the question of whether this is a good buy or not.
Voice in the back of my head tried to speak up as I typed Art Pepper, but I was too lazy to actually listen. The album, however, has been issued both on Bethlehem and on Charly.

CaptainWrong

You can't copyright mastering. I post on a message board with someone associated with Uptown records and they've had their releases duped and I was told they couldn't have used that angle to gain protection. These Byrd recordings are public domain in the EU, among other places, and they can pretty much dupe a current Blue Note disc and that's legal and I'd guess that's exactly what they did. Now, as for this collection being available in the US, it shouldn't be as they're still protected.

BigD-Bluez

Three years later.....I came up with this thread searching on Lennie Tristano a few days ago - Just received the Intuition 4 CD box set from Proper UK yesterday, but that's another story - and came back to the thread today and in the course of re-tagging that Donald Byrd set from above, I found another at eMusic - Early Years:1955-1958 - the six covered albums are right on the cover, $5.84. The bitrates are pretty feeble on some tracks from Byrd's Eye View, as happens on these graverobber specials, but the sound is OK for cut-rate. For me at this stage I'm deepening the jazz collection with mostly these type of collections, and CD box sets like that from Proper UK from Amazon Other Sellers at pretty bodacious prices - a collection of original albums at full price just isn't in the picture (but see the Amazon thread for an exception).